Fulfilling PHP Developer Wishes in 2023

In this article you can learn about:

Top Improvements For PHP Developers in the PHP Classes Site in 2022

1. Faster Access to the Site Pages to Improve the User Experience

2. Improving the Mobile Friendlyness of the Site PHP

3. Live Support to PHP Developers Via WhatsApp, Meta Group Messenger or Email

4. Attracting More Financial Supporters of the PHP Project

Upcoming PHP Classes Site New Features to Be Launched in 2023

1. Getting More Customers to Help PHP Developers Earn More Money

2. Encouraging More Feedback to Improve the Quality of the Contributions Done By Many Developers in the Site

3. Relaxing The Contribution Rules for Contributing Developers to Share Useful Code that is Not Object Oriented

Your Wishes for the PHP Community in 2023

Top Improvements For PHP Developers in the PHP Classes Site in 2022

1. Faster Access to the Site Pages to Improve the User Experience

The PHP Classes site runs on Web servers and performs other tasks in the background that can sometimes be very heavy, such as newsletter delivery.

These background tasks were slowing down the delivery of the site Web pages to the site users.

The first approach to solve this problem was to add one more dedicated server to deliver newsletter messages. This worked well in terms of the speed at the expense of increasing the site costs.

Later, in 2022, we implemented a better solution to optimize the software we developed in PHP to run the site.

This way, we no longer need the additional server just for sending newsletters. We can keep the site pages being served at a reasonable speed.

Most of the time, we can get good grades according to the Google Page Speed Insights tool, as seen in the screenshot below.

If you want to improve your site user experience, we recommend using the Google Page Speed tool or the Lighthouse tool that comes with built-in Google Chrome developer tools to test and improve your sites.

2. Improving the Mobile Friendlyness of the Site PHP

Another aspect related to the user experience is the site's friendliness for mobile phone users. We have already made part of the improvements that we need to make. In 2022 this effort was started and will continue in 2023, so we can make all the site pages render well on mobile devices.

We started this effort in 2015 to improve the site content pages for mobile device users. Since many users nowadays use a mobile device to access the site, we have improved the ability of the site to generate pages that appear well on mobile devices, including some pages that are for setting configuration options and using the site tools for content contributors.

3. Live Support to PHP Developers Via WhatsApp, Meta Group Messenger or Email

Another recent improvement is to provide faster support for the site users via WhatsApp, or Meta Group Messenger (formerly Facebook Message), an email we always have provided good support for.

Now you may see contact icons on the right side of all pages that you can use to contact us anytime to get interactive support as fast as possible via WhatsApp or the Messenger chat tools.

4. Attracting More Financial Supporters of the PHP Project

One thing that we did still in 2021, and we hope that many of you have participated in, is the efforts of the PHP Foundation to provide better financial support to core developers.

Among other aspects, the PHP Foundations collects contributions from the community that will help pay the cost of the lives of core PHP developers who continue to improve on every release.

We have published an article to tell what is the PHP Foundation and how you can contribute just with a small monthly fee to this great initiative.

If you have not yet contributed, we encourage you to start doing it now, even if you pay $5 a month to the PHP Foundation. You can find more details in the article above.

Upcoming PHP Classes Site New Features to Be Launched in 2023

1. Getting More Customers to Help PHP Developers Earn More Money

In 2021 and 2022, we conducted a research effort to help us determine what the PHP developers want more from the PHP Classes site.

One of the aspects is to improve the chances for developers to get more paying customers, so they can work more time on their Open Source developments like the packages they share on the site or tutorial articles.

We are finalizing several new features that will make it possible that contributing developers can earn more money for the work they share on the site.

There are other initiatives to help partner companies to get more customers to their businesses. We will get back to this later when we launch these initiatives in 2023.

2. Encouraging More Feedback to Improve the Quality of the Contributions Done By Many Developers in the Site

Another request from the developers we interviewed is that they want more feedback about their packages, so they can learn how to improve those packages.

We are planning to implement a new feature to encourage developers to give more feedback about each other packages.

We hope this will improve the overall quality of the packages shared on the site.

We will get back to this when we are ready to lanch this feature.

3. Relaxing The Contribution Rules for Contributing Developers to Share Useful Code that is Not Object Oriented

The name PHP Classes is ambiguous. This is something that we did not expect in 1999 when we created the site's name.

For some people, PHP classes mean teaching classes. For other people, PHP classes mean object-oriented programming components made of classes of objects.

This ambiguity is still leading some developers to share PHP components that are made of global code. Since you can still learn from the global code that others share, you can still consider that global code as "PHP classes."

We could change the name of the site to become less ambiguous. Since many users are used to finding the site by the name of PHP classes, we decided to relax the site contribution rules and allow packages made only of global code to be published on the site since 2023.

There is a category for packages made of global code called Global. All newly published packages made of global code will be added to this category.

4. Better Tools to Publish Tutorials

Another aspect that we plan to improve in 2023 is providing tools to help developers to teach how to use their packages using better tools to teach the package users in a more straightforward way that many developers will like to use.

When we are ready to announce these new tools, we will also get back to this later.

Your Wishes for the PHP Community in 2023

This is all for this year, 2022. Now it is up to you to share your wishes about what you want to be improved in the PHP Classes site or the PHP community as a whole.

If you share your wishes in the comments to this post below, we will do our best to try to implement any new features that make your wishes come true.

Merry X-Mas and Happy New Year of 2023.